Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Metacognate! The Day Ahead - October 2017

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Today's overall emphasis will be to metacognate.

First students who have self-chosen to get a bit of extra help will meet in the classroom at 8am to work on math homework.

Next the team will meet in Open Circle with the guidance counselor to talk about what it means to be new and how to best welcome a new student. It just happens that we'll welcome a new student to our classroom today too.

After recess, we'll watch a short National Geographic video about the power of metacognition when it comes to learning. We'll talk about the film a bit, and then students will follow an online learning menu as they complete a number of targeted reflections and activities to prepare their showcase portfolios for student-family-teacher conferences.

As students work, I'll talk to individual students about their overall performance, learning stats, and goals. Each child will identify a reading/writing, math, and social competency goal based on interests, reading/math stats, and what they feel is most important.

In an ideal process, I would use a good week to complete this effort, but for some reason this year feels a bit squished. I think that the addition of tight pacing guides and extensive new curriculum expectations are creating a bit of stress since the expectations, in some ways, seem unrealistic and not student-friendly. I'm thinking about that, and what I can do, and in the meantime, I'll do what I can to meet the expectations set and still teach in reasonable, child-friendly ways. Onward.